In recent years, telecommunication devices have advanced from offering simple voice calling services within wireless communication networks to providing users with many new features. Telecommunication devices now provide messaging services such as email, text messaging, and instant messaging. Such devices may also provide data services such as Internet browsing, gaming, location services, and media services such as for streaming, storing and playing video, audio, and music, just to name a few examples. Thus, telecommunication devices, referred to herein as user devices, user equipment (UE) or mobile devices, are often used in multiple contexts. In addition to such features provided by telecommunication devices, the number of users of these devices have greatly increased. Such an increase in users is expected to continue.
With ever increasing telecommunication device usage, density of wireless communication networks tends to also increase. For example, to serve a greater number of wireless users, a greater number of cellular towers and small cells may be placed in a given area. Unfortunately, such increases may lead to an inflation of signal interferences among two or more mobile devices communicating with cell towers having overlapping coverage, for example.
Typical interference control solutions are to avoid or to reduce interference sources by re-using frequencies in a larger distance, adjusting antenna patterns, or using multiple antennas. Such solutions provide limited improvement in terms of spectrum efficiency, especially as more small cells or heterogeneous network (HetNets) cells are deployed in dense traffic areas.
Another issue associated with a typical wireless communication system is that a base station only processes its own received signals from devices within its serving area. Therefore, signals transmitted by other devices with the same or adjacent frequency are treated as interference at the base station. As the number of users increase, the corresponding interference level increases and the system becomes congested.